Does Signage Actually Increase Sales? What the Research Really Shows
Ask a sign company whether signage works and you get an enthusiastic yes and a statistic with no source attached. We went looking for the actual research instead. Here is what genuinely exists, who produced it, and just as importantly what it does not prove.
Where the real research comes from
- The Sign Research Foundation (formerly the Signage Foundation), a non-profit funding academic research into signage, including work with the University of Cincinnati.
- The International Sign Association, the industry trade body, which compiles industry and economic research.
Most statistics on sign company blogs trace back to these two, usually without a citation and often with the numbers quietly rounded up.
What the studies actually found
From the Sign Research Foundation’s work on the economic value of on-premise signage:
- 60% of businesses reported sales increases of 10% or more after adding or updating a sign.
- Each additional sign at a site was associated with an expected 4.75% increase in annual sales.
- A national home décor retailer found a new building, pole or freestanding multi-tenant sign added 5–15% to a location’s sales.
- One set of targeted exterior signage changes was followed by a 16% increase in weekly sales.
On customer behaviour:
- 75% of consumers said they noticed a sign before anything else at an unfamiliar business.
- 61% of American consumers reported failing to find a business because its sign was too small or unclear.
- 36% said they had visited a new store because of the quality of its sign.
Read these numbers carefully
We would rather you trust this page than be impressed by it, so some honest caveats:
- The case studies covered a limited set of businesses – a fast food chain, a home décor retailer, auto dealers, later a lodging chain, a bank and a specialty store. That is not every industry.
- Much of it is correlation, not proof of cause. A business investing in better signage is usually investing in other things at the same time.
- Some of this work dates to the late 1990s with updates in the 2010s. Consumer behaviour has changed, and none of it accounts for how people now find businesses through phones and maps.
- It is funded by the sign industry. That does not make it wrong – the methodology is public and academic – but you should know who paid for it.
What it reasonably supports
- Legibility matters more than beauty. The most robust finding is the failure mode: people could not find a business because the sign was too small or unclear. That is a design problem you can fix cheaply.
- Signage is a fixed cost that keeps working. Unlike ad spend it is bought once and keeps operating, so even a modest effect compounds against a one-time cost.
- More visible surfaces help. The per-sign effect suggests the win is being visible from more approaches, not one bigger sign.
The practical takeaway
If you take one thing from the research, make it the legibility point. A common industry rule of thumb is roughly 10 feet of readable distance for every inch of letter height – so 3-inch letters read at about 30 feet, 1-inch letters at about 10. Measure how far away your customers actually are when they need to read the sign, then size the type from that.
